More than 3.6 million years ago, a massive meteorite struck the Siberian plains, creating an 11-mile-wide crater. Over the millennia, water flowed into the crater and thus Lake El'gygytgyn (or Lake E) was formed. Now, all those years later, scientists from the United States, Germany, the Russian Federation and Austria are returning from a six-month expedition on the lake, during which they've collected core samples they hope will give them more clues for understanding climate change in the Arctic.

University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMA) Geoscientist Julie Brigham-Grette, who is the US lead scientists in the project, says that the drill samples collected from Lake E are about 30 times longer than those harvested from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which means that they contain that much more information. In geology, experts say, the proportion is very simple – the longer the drill sample, the farther you go back in time. It then stands to reason that collecting such a large core sample will allow the researchers who are about to start investigating it a look into the planet's distant past.

In early June, the 3.5 tonnes of material, which are currently kept in a controlled-atmosphere environment, will be flown to St. Petersburg, in Russia, and then ferried to a special laboratory in Germany, where paleoclimatologists will begin their analysis. The results will be correlated with those obtained from other core sample studies, gathered from different latitudes, altitudes and places around the world.

“Studying high-latitude systems is of great importance to an understanding of Earth's climate at all latitudes. Of primary interest is determining why and how the Arctic evolved from a warm forested ecosystem to a cold permafrost ecosystem between two and three million years ago,” the Program Director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, Paul Filmer, said of the ongoing studies. The DES co-funded the Lake E expedition together with the Office of Polar Programs, also a part of the NSF.

“Earth's warm and cold cycles over the past one million years varied every 100,000 years at times. Before that, however, climate change, especially in high latitudes, varied over 41,000- and 23,000-year cycles. The record from Lake E will show the ramp up to that type of change in the Earth's climate,” Brigham-Grette concluded.